I guess I should've expected it sooner or later, from a presidential
administration which is doing its best to socially engineer the school-aged
population of this country along Politically Correct lines.
'Scuse me while I put on my war face: somebody's attacking my
Marine Corps.
At a recent academic conference, Assistant Army Secretary Sara
Lister attacked the Marine Corps' failure to make its recruit training
a coed operation, going so far as to call Marines and their philosophy
"extremist" and "dangerous."
She was answered by the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen.
Charles Krulak, who observed that the "extremist" label would “dishonor
the hundreds of thousands of men whose blood has been shed in the name
of freedom ... Honor, courage and comitment are not extreme."
(We Marines will accept "dangerous," of course. It is, after
all, our JOB to be dangerous.)
Miz Lister was promptly forced to resign, but I'm afraid the
culture from which her comments stem has been numbed for too long by the
propaganda that men and women are, and should be, "completely equal" on
the battlefield. That's horse dung, as any person — male or female — who's
ever served anywhere near a combat unit can attest.
Americans have spent way too much time planted in front of the
television set. We've convinced ourselves that Ripley, Xena and Red Sonja
are the norm among womanhood. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Characters like that are exceptions — extremely rare exceptions, at that.
Perhaps Miz Lister and others have never seen service first-hand.
Perhaps Miz Lister never went around to check her squad during
the middle of the night, finding one of her fire-team leaders applying
bright-red lipstick, her rifle half-buried in sand 10 feet away because
it was "too heavy."
Perhaps Miz Lister was never passed over for promotion in favor
of a pregnant woman who pointedly stated the only reason she was staying
in the Corps was because "this is better than welfare!"
Perhaps Miz Lister never had to carry someone else's backpack
while ordering other members of her squad to drag along one of her troops
because the girl couldn't handle a 10-mile hump.
Perhaps Miz Lister never had the experience of finding
one of her female troops running stark-naked down the hallway of a barracks
in the middle of the night, upset because she couldn't find a date for
the weekend.
Perhaps Miz Lister never had to lead a squad of her troops into
a seedy topless bar to pull one of her female troops off the stage, clothe
her and return her to the barracks before she was caught by the MPs.
I saw each of those things happen during my time in the Corps.
They were the norm, not the exceptions.
The overwhelming majority of women do not have the simple physical
strength to handle the "glamor" combat roles which the Marines along
still reserve exclusively for males. But I've seen the exceptions: people
like SgtMaj. Bernadette Howard, Sgt. Charlene Getchell, Capt. Cathy Engels
and others.
Were all women possessed of the same sheer mental fortitude,
we wouldn't have to argue about the appropriateness of women in combat
roles.
These exceptions joined the Corps not because it was a great
place to find guys, had a great college-fund program or because it a great
dental plan; they joined because they wanted to be Marines. There is no
higher calling.